(7 of 8)
It is almost impossible for a Latin-American regime to antagonize Good Neighbor Roosevelt, and the New York Times, in reporting the confiscation of 187 U. S.-owned estates, one of 27,000 acres, observed last week: "If the November election is any indication, the majority of Americans favor President Roosevelt's policy of not allowing individual Americans to loot our southern brothers."
While "our southern brothers" are looting U. S. capitalists discreetly, a much greater number of Mexican landlords are notified from time to time by the Government that their estates have been taken from them (in exchange for what the Mexican Congress calls "ironclad, guaranteed bonds" which they must accept) and parceled out among the local peasants. A Mexican peasant, once established on such land, is by no means sure that he will not be visited by a landlord's lynching party who may cut off his ears and throw them in his face. Incidents of this kind have their counterpart in irate bands of the newly-landed Mexican peasantry who burst in upon the gentry and do many a mischief. However, under strong President Cardenas, Mexicans are less & less cutting off each other's ears.
Under the law of 1917, as administered by the Cardenas Government, Mexican statesmen claim to be gradually "restoring" the country's lands to what they claim was the "communal status" of these lands centuries ago, prior to the arrival of the Spanish conquerors and their land-lordly Church. Today the Mexican peasant who is set down by the Government on a piece of land retains title to it only so long as he and his direct descendants live and continue to work it, after which the land automatically reverts to the "Mexican community."
Between Cardenas' "community" and the Communism of either Trotsky or Stalin there is every difference, but Mexico is nonetheless frankly a land of proletarian reform. As England's great, liberal Manchester Guardian observed in a gentlemanly salute to Trotsky last week, "Let us hope he will find a sure refuge in Mexico—a revolutionary country where a great revolutionary may be appreciated and understood." At latest reports, Host Diego Rivera had had to return to a hospital with a kidney ailment; Mrs. Trotsky had gone to bed with what seemed to be a recurrence of her malaria; Guest Trotsky, respectfully watched and waited on by dark-eyed young Hostess Rivera, had resumed dictation to his secretaries of his monumental Biography of Lenin, begun nearly two years ago.
*Mexican National Revolutionary Party.
†No South American country today recognizes the Soviet Union.
*President Cardenas, too, usually alights in the suburbs and enters his capital in this manner, the safest.
†Stalin is Dictator by virtue of his office as Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party in Russia, finds it convenient to let Molotov be Premier and Kalinin President, as these offices are completely dwarfed by his power.